To what degree has the development of alternative mortgage funding channels promoted the recent boom and bust in U.S. housing markets? Past research examined whether Alt-A and subprime market shares are correlated with the housing bubble. This paper expands the analysis to include the share of...

The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) mandates the reporting of mortgage loan applications. Nearly all studies of mortgage lending patterns done in recent years rely on the data collected under HMDA. However, not all mortgages are reported under HMDA. Understanding the relationship between...

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate mortgage refinancing in the following three categories: refinancing and rate-and-point choice, refinancing and borrowers mortgage instrument choice, and estimating the market refinancing share of total mortgage origination volume. The choice of...

We investigate determinants of lenders' choice to securitize loans, focusing on the quality of loans they sell to investors in the secondary mortgage market relative to ones they retain on their balance-sheets. Using several large datasets of mortgage loans originated between 2004 and 2007, we...

Toxic mortgage related assets in bank portfolios have tested the pervasive free market wisdom that markets can effectively discipline the risk taking behavior of financial firms. In the buildup to the current crises, banks over-leveraged themselves by investing in risky mortgage securities. In...

The price of a single-family house can be viewed as the bundle of the land price, and the replacement/construction cost of the structure, adjusted for depreciation. Given the difficulty in obtaining accurate estimates of each of the elements, previous researches estimate land price as the...

The refinance shares reported by Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey (PMMS), the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA), the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), and the National Mortgage News (NMN) have differed by up to 21 percentage points between 1990 and 2005. If a lender’s...

The extreme snowfall events have increased in recent years in the Tibetan Plateau (TP). However, soil water-heat transfer under different snow conditions has rarely been explored in detail. Here, multi-source observational data of five years is analyzed for the influence of snow cover on...

House prices in the United States rose 14 percent in real terms during the 1990s; by historical standards, this was strong performance. Some analysts have worried that this performance was too strong, perhaps indicating an asset bubble, and could not be explained by fundamentals. This paper...